60 minutes one-on-one with Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Timothy Dwight. Master's Office. He walks in for the fax machine, returns to his suite, I follow. Dazed. In awe. Yevgeny Yevtushenko—the celebrated poet of the post-Stalin generation of Russian poets, a monument by himself: political dissident, film director, politician, writer, novelist, but above all a poet.

Yale Herald: What do you consider to be your best work?

ALLISON CLOWERY/YH The face of a poet: Yevtushenko speaks

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: It's very difficult to separate all your works and choose. My best? I don't know, but surely the most important would be the novella in verse—A Dove in Santiago. It's about a suicide that I witnessed in the Carrera Hotel in San-tiago, Chile. A boy around 18 years of age slowly walked to the edge of the roof and jumped. He did not die when he fell down on the ground but in the air, where we saw his body in convulsions, struck by electric cables. His body landed on a dove on the asphalt and killed it. His mother found my portrait in his room and she called to ask me if I could write a poem on him to prevent young people from ever considering such a death for themselves. She had no idea that I had witnessed the suicide. Coincidences. Amazingly enough, this incident happened just when I was thinking about ways to kill myself. It was a low point in my life filled with accusations... so the poem came across as something very personal and when it was published first in 1978, over 300 people who were taking suicide into account as a mode of escape called or wrote to say the poem saved them. When I think of A Dove in Santiago in this regard, all my other works seem dwarfed.

YY: Pushkin. He was a son of harmony; he recreated Russian language. Today, we speak Pushkin's words. A political poet with a childlike curiosity toward life. Definitely, Pushkin.

YY: I am a writer of those who don't write. What is important is the ability to get the thoughts across to them and for them—it may be in the form of a film, it may be poetry. That is my focus. As long as I am able to express myself, the genre does not matter.

YY: Writing is a form of spiritual pregnancy. Therefore artists understand women like no one else. Of course, the pregnancy in this case sometimes lasts longer than nine months. It is very important to find form and each time it has to be a new form. In addition, when you write about the common mass, you have to write according to the way they understand or interpret language. But when you write for intellectuals, the writing has to cater to their tastes. And I am only slightly intellectual.

YH: Is your favorite poem your own or someone else's?

YY: It is an eight-line-poem by Pushkin—"I loved you; and perhaps I love you still." Many have tried to translate it but failed because of the deceptive nature of what seems to be transparent simplicity. It is like images of little stones at the bottom of a clear mountain-lake that impresses upon you to think the water is shallow when it is rather too deep. I admire his poems because they are accessible even to the moderately educated mass. Yet they are neither banal nor primitive.

YH: From what would you derive greater pleasure—winning the Nobel Prize for Literature or a little girl being able to completely understand one of your poems?

YY [smiling]: But of course the latter!

YH: Your happiest memory?

YY: The time of World War II. I was lying on a hayloft. Starving. Deep in the night. And there was something special, something so different about the way the fresh hay (a little dry in places) smelled. My fingers prodded through its layers and I suddenly felt an almost unnatural softness—a wild strawberry. As I groped through, I came upon one strawberry after another, like little miracles. [a pause] Nothing is sweeter than the smell of wild strawberries in hay. Hiding.

From the macabre scene of Stalin's funeral that Yevtushenko describes in his autobiography and references in his movie, to the denounciation of Nazi and Russian anti-Semitism and, finally, to the smell of wild strawberries in hay, Yevtushenko is all about diversity. However, a dazed tone runs throughout his work.

And so one may ponder on him and his corrugated memories with a few lines from the work he calls his best ever...

Fatigue of the weariest body weighs so little
Compared with the soul's, but if the two join forces
You haven't the strength even to cry.. And when
You are too tired to cry, then is the time
You especially want to...That's how tired I was
One time...
Of what?
Of life? No, not of life,
It's above accusations. I was tired of all
I found in it that resembled death, not life.

—From A Dove in Santiago

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